Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

EXISTENCE AND DEATH 49
Do the workings of power, its mechanisms, really belong primarily to the category
of repression, Foucault asks, or have subjects been talked into it, seduced into
subordination, finding pleasure in the penetration by power Can it be said that our
desire and disobedience are rooted in a passion for the phallus, Lacan’s only
signifier Foucault’s concept of power is ideological. The intimacy of violence is not
its enjoyment. Of course, if we say we don’t like that, we are told there can be no
escape. Even our resistance is already inscribed, constituted, contained, absorbed,
impossible. Is that so Does this mean that we can only perform with the pleasure
and power of Judith, who slept with King Holofernes to cut off his head Because
that is what he desires, if there is no other history.
Foucauldian feminism is ill-advised: how can we speak with The Master’s voice,
tell our lives in his categories Denise Riley’s 5 (1988) “Am I That Name”
Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History is written against the claim of
Black abolitionist Soujourner Truth: “Ain’t I a woman” At the 1851 Akron
Convention on Women’s Rights, Truth stood fiercely for women’s strengths,
diversity and collectivity. Riley positions herself in opposition to those who
“proclaim that the reality of women is yet to come, but that this time, it’s we,
women, who will define her” (1988, pp. 4–5). Indeed, Riley’s future—and past—is
not female but Foucault. Her history is an unconvincing portrayal of deconstructed
and decontextualized feminist straw-women. Riley’s text is indeed inspired by the
pale, pure Desdemona, wife of Othello who asked “Am I that name” We should
remember that it was her fate to be strangled, without a personal or political voice.
Desdemona did not speak out, take action, or suspect Iago’s plot against her. She
fretted in her boudoir rather than joining with her maidservant, Emilia, clearly a
more interesting character who said: “Why, we have galls; and though we have some
grace,/Yet we have some revenge.” (Act IV, Scene III, Part II, Othello)
Foucault sees feminism as a sexual liberation movement caught up in the
apparatus of sexuality which he describes in The History of Sexuality. In an
interview, “Power and Sex,” he is asked whether it is true that he said that the prolife
and pro-choice movements “employ basically the same discourse” (Foucault:
1977/1988, p. 114). He responds:
They claimed that I was putting them all in one bag to drown them like a litter
of kittens. Diametrically false: that is not what I meant to say. But the
important thing is, I didn’t say it at all. But a statement is one thing, discourse
another. They share common tactics even though they have conflicting
strategies (1977/1988, p. 114).
5. See Liz Stanley’s critique of Denise Riley’s approach in “Recovering Women in History from
Feminist Deconstruction.” Briefly, Stanley points to the assumptions in deconstruction which silence
women’s experiences: “One is the failure to see heterosexuality as a metanarrative binding the
category women to the category men. Another is the tacit denial of aged, black, lesbian, disabled, and
working-class women’s struggles to name themselves as such. Also women, not just feminists,
theorise their own lives and experiences in actually complex deconstructionist terms which
recognize multiple fractures within the category women.” (1990, p. 151, italics in original) See also
Tania Modleski (1991) pp. 20– 22 for a critique of Riley.